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How large a drive in PowerBooks?

Parsa

Parsa

macrumors member
Original poster
I'm a teacher, and now that the 12" PB has dropped into the iBook range ($1499), I'm considering getting it (with $200 savings on the iPod combo most likely).

My question is this: Should I get it with the 40GB drive?
How big a third party drive will work in the PB 12"? If 60GB is the limit, I'll buy that from Apple, but if I can put in a 120MB+ drive in, I'll buy the machine stock (40GB) and replace the drive myself. (I've added larger drives to a PB before).

I won't even bother asking about RAM as Apple's RAM is expensive.
 
You can put in any standard notebook drive. If you can find one that's 60 GB or above, below the price of the upgrade, I would go with stock and upgrade on my own. I looked here for price. Link

$250 for a 5400 rpm 60 GB notebook drive. Than you can get a 2.5" firewire enclosure and put in your stock hard drive in there. You end up with ± 100 GB storage.

*edit*

OK, so I went to the Apple store and there is only $50 difference between 40 GB and 60 GB - I would go with that, unless you want the 5400 rpm drive. I have not found a notebook drive above 60GB.
 
Laptop drives in the future

Yes, 80GB was the largest I found for sale, but most are not cheap, and the 60GB deal from Apple is better.

I was thinking of the future. I'd expect that larger drives will appear. The drives now are 40 and 60, but it wasn't long ago that they were 1 and 2 GB drives!

Thanks for your responses.
 
one more thing:

are you getting applecare? i'm pretty sure that installing a HD on yr own violates applecare/warranty. you'd need to pay an authorized service specialist to install the HD, and it would have to a HD apple approves (ie: not the travelstar 7200 rpm)...just something else to consider.
 
Just a heads up on notebook hard drive sizes: the largest possible notebook hard drive size is 80 GB. One thing you should seriously consider is the installation procedure for this drive. It probably wouldn't be cheap for the drive or installation, my suggestion would be to use BTO at Apple's Online Store to get the 60 GB drive.
 
I think you can only use the 9 mm drives not the 12 mm because of the size. Also you have to factor in that a 7200 rpm drive creates more head/ noise/ uses more power. If you are going to upgrade yourself please post pictures somewhere. I think I might do the same. Also, get a drive with 8-16 MB of cache. that will improve read/write performance.
 
Originally posted by NavyIntel007
I think you can only use the 9 mm drives not the 12 mm because of the size. Also you have to factor in that a 7200 rpm drive creates more head/ noise/ uses more power. If you are going to upgrade yourself please post pictures somewhere. I think I might do the same. Also, get a drive with 8-16 MB of cache. that will improve read/write performance.
Click to expand...

If wishes were horses...7200 RPM drives with 8-16 MBs of cache do not exist in laptop form. Sorry, but they don't. And even if they did, they'd probably burn a hole through your leg. The best you can hope for are 5400 RPM models with 2 Megs of cache, plus, the average user won't notice the difference between the 4200 RPM drives Apple uses and 5400 RPM drives.

--EDIT--
I'm so sorry, a lot has changed since I last looked up hard drives. 7200 RPM drives do exist. My bad. Please don't flame my for my ignorance, but my recommendation for the 60 GB BTO from Apple stands.
 
How much of a battery hit would you see in a 4200, 5400, 7200 RPM laptop HD? I figure Apple only uses 4200 RPM drives now for battery bragging rights.
 
Originally posted by ZildjianKX
How much of a battery hit would you see in a 4200, 5400, 7200 RPM laptop HD? I figure Apple only uses 4200 RPM drives now for battery bragging rights.
Click to expand...

stats i pulled on a 4200 rpm 60GB Fujitsu:
Power requirement Spin up : 0.90A maximum
Power requirement Read/write : 2.3 W (typical)
Power requirement Idle (ready) : 0.65 W (typical)
Power requirement Sleep : 0.1 W (typical)

courtesy of this spot.

from the 40GNX (5400 rpm) stats:
Startup (max peak): 5.0W
Seek (average): 2.6W
Read (average): 2.5W
Write (average): 2.5W
Low power idle (average): 0.85W
Standby (average): 0.25W
Sleep: 0.1W

from here.

it's just a tad bit more. nothing to brag about. i don't think you can get 7200 rpm drives in 2.5 inchers yet.

apple went with 4200 rpm drives on the powerbook because fujitsu used really dense platters, dense enough to make the 4200 rpm drive read faster than any 5400 rpm drives available.
 
sweet!! 😀 you can get 7200 rpm notebook drives now! last time i checked it was only a 5400 limit.

could a 7200 rpm drive be put into the 17" PowerBook perhaps? that would be awesome, even more of a desktop replacement. 🙂
 
Originally posted by Shadowfax
apple went with 4200 rpm drives on the powerbook because fujitsu used really dense platters, dense enough to make the 4200 rpm drive read faster than any 5400 rpm drives available.
Click to expand...

Are you usre a 4200 rpm drive has a faster seek time than a 5400 rpm drive? It just doesn't seem physically possible. No one has noticed a signifigant performance boost by upgrading from a 4200 rpm drive to a 5400 rpm? My guess was that apple stuck w/ those hard drives since they had a contract w/ Fujitsu (and not just the power consumption), but then again the Ipods use Toshibas...
 
Originally posted by ZildjianKX
Are you usre a 4200 rpm drive has a faster seek time than a 5400 rpm drive? It just doesn't seem physically possible. No one has noticed a signifigant performance boost by upgrading from a 4200 rpm drive to a 5400 rpm? My guess was that apple stuck w/ those hard drives since they had a contract w/ Fujitsu (and not just the power consumption), but then again the Ipods use Toshibas...
Click to expand...

i was planning to upgrade to 5400 rpm as soon as i got my tibook, but after a week of use i realized i didn't need to. i captured (and edited/deleted) about three hours worth of video in 15-20 min. chunks. no audio drift, no dropped frames. the HDs are actually quite good.
 
Originally posted by ZildjianKX
Are you usre a 4200 rpm drive has a faster seek time than a 5400 rpm drive? It just doesn't seem physically possible. No one has noticed a signifigant performance boost by upgrading from a 4200 rpm drive to a 5400 rpm? My guess was that apple stuck w/ those hard drives since they had a contract w/ Fujitsu (and not just the power consumption), but then again the Ipods use Toshibas...
Click to expand...
If we assume that 5400rpm drive truly is 33% faster than 4200rpm (not the case but oh well) based on everything else being equal, if the bits on the drive (1's and 0's) are 33% closer together (.66units instead of 1unit of distance apart), then the 4200rpm drive could have read performance equal to that of the 5400rpm at 1unit. Problems with this are many, including needing better / faster head to read the closer bits among other things. Of course, this is all conjecture.

Even though you can buy the 80GB drives now.... I would do the BTO for 60GB from Apple, use that for 2 years, then buy a nice cheap 160GB drive! 😉
 
Originally posted by ZildjianKX
Are you usre a 4200 rpm drive has a faster seek time than a 5400 rpm drive? It just doesn't seem physically possible. No one has noticed a signifigant performance boost by upgrading from a 4200 rpm drive to a 5400 rpm? My guess was that apple stuck w/ those hard drives since they had a contract w/ Fujitsu (and not just the power consumption), but then again the Ipods use Toshibas...
Click to expand...
i don't know about seek time. this may be impacted slightly, though, as some have said, not necessarily so. the main thing is that sustained transfer rates are improved by a pretty good margin.

Originally posted by cb911
sweet!! 😀 you can get 7200 rpm notebook drives now! last time i checked it was only a 5400 limit.

could a 7200 rpm drive be put into the 17" PowerBook perhaps? that would be awesome, even more of a desktop replacement. 🙂
Click to expand...
link?
 
Just look around a little. I've seen 7200 RPM drives and (as somebody denied earlier) 16MB chaches on 9mm laptop HD's (tho not the two features on the same drive).

It is a little annoying how people just automatically assume 7200 is better than 5400 and the same for 4200. Read the specs on these drives and you will immediatly begin to realize why apple chose to use which hardware. They were actually making good choices when they made your machine :-].

BEN
 
Originally posted by saabmp3
Just look around a little. I've seen 7200 RPM drives and (as somebody denied earlier) 16MB chaches on 9mm laptop HD's (tho not the two features on the same drive).

It is a little annoying how people just automatically assume 7200 is better than 5400 and the same for 4200. Read the specs on these drives and you will immediatly begin to realize why apple chose to use which hardware. They were actually making good choices when they made your machine :-].

BEN
Click to expand...
i agree. i like my 4200 rpm hard drive in my powerbook. i don't think that the first 7200 rpm laptop drives will be that impressive. you need at least 8MB of cache on the drive to really make it scream, and i have also only seen that, or 16 MB, on overpriced 5400 rpm drives.
 
60 GB is pretty good size, I'd go with that unless you really like to dig around inside computers. Unless of course, you have thousands of audio files, or want to edit hours of video. Plus its only like $40 more for 50% more drive space over the 40 GB. You could always get an ipod for another 30 GB of storageas well. I've had no complaints about the 60 gigger in my TiBook. I was a little concerned too when I first saw the specs, but then I read further and saw why they went with these drives. Then when I got my computer I thought about it, but then forgot, since I never really noticed a problem.
 
Originally posted by cb911
sweet!! 😀 you can get 7200 rpm notebook drives now! last time i checked it was only a 5400 limit.

could a 7200 rpm drive be put into the 17" PowerBook perhaps? that would be awesome, even more of a desktop replacement. 🙂
Click to expand...
sure it could but i don t recommend it. as it uses a LOT more energy, and if you are not really doing some intense working you will not get the difference.
 
Maximum the laptops can address?

What is the maximum number of gigabytes that the 12" and 17" powerbooks can address?

Is it 80GB, or will larger, future drives possibly work?
(For instance I heard the PowerBook Duo 2300c can address 3GB maximum, but they came with 1GB drives.)
 
Re: Maximum the laptops can address?

Originally posted by Parsa
What is the maximum number of gigabytes that the 12" and 17" powerbooks can address?

Is it 80GB, or will larger, future drives possibly work?
(For instance I heard the PowerBook Duo 2300c can address 3GB maximum, but they came with 1GB drives.)
Click to expand...
the OS addresses the hard drives, i believe, so they should have the same max size as an Xserve, i think. it's probably in terabytes, or at least well over 200 GB. it's RAM that's limited, i believe you can only put 1 GB in any powerbook (well 640 on the 12 inch). Apple may have been cool and allowed them to work with 1 GB SO-DIMMs, though, when they come out. that would be a rare thing for a company to do, but apple might just be that nice. i know my old Dell PIII 866 wouldn't take more than 256 Modules because dell was too lazy to get a decent mobo... dunno about apple.

but the point being, it's the old FAT file system that sucked and wouldn't let you partition over 2 GB of space. NTS, UFS+, and other modern file systems will let you do this. there is no hardware limitation on hard drive size i am aware of.
 
Originally posted by maradong
sure it could but i don t recommend it. as it uses a LOT more energy, and if you are not really doing some intense working you will not get the difference.
Click to expand...

i agree. 7200 might be the biggest and best, but that doesn't mean you should rush out and get it-- i'd say in the long run, you'll value the battery life more than a very small increase in sustained disk use...

pnw
 
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